


not all that glitters is gold

by defractum (nyargles)



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Butcher Neil Josten, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 00:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13135143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyargles/pseuds/defractum
Summary: Neil has only killed once before, but he’s not averse to doing it again. Not if that’s what it takes to save Andrew.The ransom note lies on the kitchen table, sprawled among the Christmas cards and bills.An urban magic AU feat. butcher!Neil.





	not all that glitters is gold

**Author's Note:**

> For [broship-addict](https://broship-addict.tumblr.com/) as part of the [AFTG Exchange](http://aftgexchange.tumblr.com/) Winter 2017 round.
> 
> Merry Christmas, and I hope you enjoy!

Neil has only killed once before, but he’s not averse to doing it again. Not if that’s what it takes to save Andrew.

The ransom note lies on the kitchen table, sprawled among the Christmas cards and bills.

It proposes a fair exchange; the head of Kevin Day in exchange for Andrew returned safely, except Neil feels like there’s nothing fair about this situation. He grips the back of a chair so hard the wood creaks under his hands.

There’s a raven sigil stamped at the bottom of the page that identifies it as from the Moriyamas, but Neil could have guessed that just from the message. No one else has as invested an interest in Kevin as the Moriyamas. He’s valuable in part for his power, and in part for who he is.

Kevin huddles in on himself in the corner of Neil’s kitchen, drinking a bottle of vodka neat and swearing. From the pathetic sight he is now, it’s hard to believe that he was once the most powerful (and only) human good luck charm in existence.

The raven flaps its wings and sets itself on fire – Neil swears, and tosses the flaming bit of paper into the sink where it burns itself out, reduced to nothing but the smell of smoke within a few seconds.

He watches it and contemplates, rubbing the knuckles of his useless right pinkie under the thin material of his gloves. No doubt Riko thinks that Neil is like him, vulnerable without powerful people around him to protect him. Riko isn’t a curse worker – that’s why he’s relegated to the secondary branch of the Moriyama family. If he had a power, even as a second son, there would be some sort of place for him serving the main family, and so he surrounds himself with other curse workers instead, to do his dirty work for him. Once, Kevin had been one of them.

But Neil is not like Riko. Andrew might be known as Neil’s bodyguard, but it’s for appearances more than anything else.

“I’m not turning you over,” Neil informs Kevin shortly. He pries the vodka out of Kevin’s hands and shoves him out of the kitchen. Nicky and Aaron are in the living room, the TV paused on some video game; Nicky rises when Neil comes in, and Neil shepherds Kevin towards him.

“Keep him occupied,” he tells Nicky. It’ll keep Nicky from hysterics too, something to focus on.

“How?”

“Don’t care, as long as he doesn’t give himself alcohol poisoning. Plan a con, sit on him, whatever.”

“Where are you going?” That’s Aaron. He and Neil aren’t really on talking terms. He’s only here because Andrew wouldn’t be anywhere else.

Neil barely spares him a glance. “To get Andrew back.”

A plan is forming in his head as he shuts himself in the study. Neil’s got several objectives, and he ticks them off to himself in order of importance. To get Andrew back, unharmed. To _keep_ Kevin unharmed. To stop that miserable excuse for a human being Riko Moriyama from doing this ever again.

His first port of call is Renee.

“Neil!” Renee greets him warmly. He can see her in his mind’s eye, smiling and tucking her long skirt underneath her as she settles into a seat. He tries to imagine a world where he might smile back, sink into an armchair opposite and they just talk about sports or the news or something equally innocuous, but it just doesn’t come into focus. That sort of world isn’t for people like them.

“Hi,” he says, and pauses. He doesn’t know where to start.

Fortunately, Renee is never one to let awkward silences stew. “Did you need something?”

Neil breathes. “It’s Andrew. He’s been taken.”

There’s silence on her end now. When she speaks again, she sounds different. Like she’s from Neil’s world. “What do you need?”

“I need your knives.”

“You’ve got them. And?”

Renee is a memory worker. She can steal or alter memories, but at the cost of her own. She never worked alongside Neil – she had already got out of the game by the time they met – but she’d worked for a different crime family, taking care of witnesses. By the time she met Neil, she’d already started to lose chunk of her own memories to the blowback of her own power.

She spends her life atoning for her sins these days: charity work, mostly. Neil had asked her once how she could be convinced she’d done so many bad things if she couldn’t remember them all; she had said it was exactly because of how much she couldn’t remember. She’d shown him her journals, notebooks upon notebooks filled with her memories, her day-to-day, and the red marks she makes against the ones she no longer remembers.

So it’s not a light request that he’s making her. “And I may need to borrow your power.”

“Okay.”

Neil doesn’t second guess her. Anyone else, he’d ask if they’re sure they’re willing to give up more memories for him – for Andrew. For Renee, he’s sure.

“Only a little bit,” he adds, in the hopes that it makes him feel less like a terrible person. It doesn’t work.

The next thing he needs is Kevin, but he doesn’t need Kevin to actually participate in this; the safe in his desk has all he needs. He’s got a jewellery case in there with precious gems set into necklaces, rings, bracelets. Neil’s not exactly the kind of person to wear jewellery, but precious stones hold luck magic the best, and the purer the gem, the stronger the magic.

Anyone can get a string of pearls or some cheap and cheerful tiger’s eye bracelets on the black market with a little bit of luck imbued into them, but Neil considers an enormous emerald pendant, a bracelet of gleaming rubies and pair of sapphire earrings. He eventually tucks the rubies onto his wrist, hidden under his glove; the rest, he puts back into the jewellery box and brings it with him to the car. This is Kevin’s finest work.

Also in the safe are a set of knives, kept sharp though rarely used these days. Neil straps two around his forearms, and tucks a small switchblade into his pocket as a last resort.

The last thing Neil needs is the most important, but he can get it in the car.

He asks Dan to drive him over to the Moriyama branch family’s house. She’s a good getaway driver, and has a bit of magic, just enough emotion work to manipulate people into feeling sympathetic towards her.

“If I don’t come back out or call within an hour, leave and warn the others,” Neil tells her.

“And then I’ll get you out of there myself,” she retorts, and he smiles.

They pick Renee up along the way, and she’s swapped her sparkly shirts and rainbow skirts for a no-nonsense suit and her own set of knives. Her satiny black gloves run up to her elbows, hiding them there, but Neil can see them because he’s looking for them.

“They’ll take too long to get off,” he says, nodding at the gloves. She smiles at him, and shows him the tiny slits in the fingertips that allow her the skin contact required for all curse working.

Neil nods, impressed.

“I brought you a pair,” she says quietly. Perhaps she’s already guessed what he’s going to do. Neil swaps his black gloves for hers; they’re a bit tight, but they’ll do.

Riko’s house is swarming with armed security, most of them probably curse workers, but they get escorted up the path with no issues. They’re searched for weapons on the way in and give up all of their knives. The charmed bracelet, they leave, which is lucky even if it’s manufactured luck.

The moment they’re let through, Neil reaches into his pocket, touching some of the spare change in there with his bare skin, testing out exactly where those slits in Renee’s gloves are. See, Neil has the rarest kind of curse magic of them all: transformation work. The ability to turn one thing into another thing. As long as his hands have skin contact with an item, he can turn that thing into something else. Every cent, quarter, dime, crumpled up receipt in his pocket is a potential weapon.

The blowback tends to be a bit weird – the last time he had merely turned a knife into a fork, and feathers had erupted around his neck before being swallowed back up by his flesh. It had been unnerving to say the least.

However, Neil doesn’t need that kind of weapon just now. He’s ushered into a room where Riko is waiting for him, learning on the side of the desk with narrowed eyes. The two men who escorted them in take up positions either side of the door. In the chair behind the table is Andrew, his arms and legs cuffed to the chair. There’s a gash across his cheek, and a darkening bruise spreading over his jaw; Neil catalogues each injury in his mind.

“I’ve got what you asked for,” says Neil, holding up a bag. Dark liquid seeps through the bottom of it, but Riko doesn’t even notice the dripping stains onto his carpet.

"That was easier than I thought it'd be." Riko’s eyes gleam with anticipation. “Did he even see the betrayal coming?”

Neil doesn’t answer him, just holds the bag out for Riko to see. Riko tries to tug the bag out of Neil’s hands, but he refuses, making him peer inside. Riko laughs when he sees the contents, and nods to one of his men; they undo Andrew’s cuffs and shove him over. 

Neil notes the way Andrew glares at them and limps across to Renee’s side of the room. She’s the only other person Andrew would let steady him, which is the unspoken reason as to why Neil brought her, and not anyone else. Only when Andrew is out of reach of any of Riko’s men does Neil let go of the bag. Objective one, check.

“See how easy it is to get your little boyfriend to do something for me?” Riko opens it delightedly, like a child with an extra Christmas present they weren’t expecting to get. He upturns the bag onto the desk for Andrew to see.

Kevin’s head rolls out. It’s severed at the neck, congealing blood smearing the desk top.

Objective two, check.

There’s a momentary silence, as if everyone in the room is collectively holding their breath, wondering what the fuck is happening, and Neil takes that as his cue to move. He slides up behind Riko, grabbing him by the neck. He can feel warm skin and the leap of his pulse under his fingertips before Neil calls on his magic.

One moment, Riko is there, the next, he’s not.

The two guards reach for their guns, but that means holding their arms out. Renee slides one hand around each of their fists, and neatly remove their memories of what’s just happened. Andrew shucks his gloves – his don’t have neat holes in, Neil’s going to have to see that he gets a pair – and places his bare hands across their faces.

“You’re really hungry,” he tells them. “All you want is a snack, right the fuck now.”

They both turn and leave. Renee manages to close the door behind them before the blowback hits all of them.

Neil’s arrives first – he crumples to the floor as pain lances through his side. He’s a transformation worker, and he just transformed a living human being into the small figurine he’s now got in his hand. It’s a neat way of killing, but his magic knows that it’s still murder. He gasps for air as his entire left side feels like it’s on fire, starting from his knees and coursing up until it concentrates in his fingers, his left pinkie to be more precise. He feels it wither, the flesh crumpling in on itself as it has once before.

He looks up to see Andrew looming over him, teeth gritted. The pain was worth it.

There’s a terse silence for a moment – it’s not as if he had time to explain the plan to Andrew. He wonders if Andrew’s angry at him.

“I’m so fucking hungry,” says Andrew. Neil wheezes a laugh, and lets Andrew pull him upright.

Andrew’s an emotion worker – useful at the best of times, but his blowback means he feels whatever feeling he’s just inflicted on someone else. Neil had once considered asking Andrew why he even works for Neil, if he has to also feel every negative emotion he bestows on someone, but had stopped himself in time. He knows why.

In that respect, hunger’s probably not too bad.

Andrew reaches out, and Neil lets him. He feels a bit of a thrill, even after all this time, to see Andrew’s bare hands outside of their bedroom. Everyone wears gloves, regardless of whether they’re a curse worker or not, and only those intimate would take their gloves off around each other. Two out of Andrew’s three are in this room, and Kevin sort of counts considering there’s a bleeding replica of his head on the table at the moment. It had originally been a pack of tissues Neil had found in the glovebox.

Gently, Andrew peels Neil’s gloves off. Previously, his right hand had four good fingers and one blackened, shrivelled pinkie, the permanent and irreversible blowback from killing his father. Now, his left hand matches. Andrew runs his fingers across the new injury, and looks up at Neil from under his blond lashes.

He doesn’t have to say anything, and Neil doesn’t have to say anything back. He just turns their hands so that they press together palm to palm, fingers intertwining.

“What did you lose?” Neil asks Renee as she walks over to them.

She shrugs. “I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to see.”

“Sorry about your knives,” he tells Renee. They probably won’t be able to get them back before leaving.

“I wasn’t using them anyway,” says Renee with a shrug. “How’s your finger?”

Neil shrugs back. “I wasn’t using it anyway.”

He puts the little figurine that used to be Riko Moriyama on the desk, next to the fake head of Kevin Day. It’s a fox, Neil’s sigil. Then he leaves the jewellery box open for Riko’s brother, the Lord Moriyama, to find.

The gems are priceless. More valuable, he hopes, than Ichirou’s value for his brother.

They put their gloves back on, and they leave. Objective three, check and mate.

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely based on the world of Holly Black’s The Curse Workers series (which I highly recommend), but hopefully no prior knowledge of it was needed!
> 
> Please leave a comment if you liked it, or hit me up on [tumblr](http://defractum.tumblr.com).


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